One day, Vitya got bitten by 14 ticks all at once. He didn’t come to the forest for that at all. And he didn’t expect such hostility from the hazel thicket. For his health, Vitya smeared the ticks with brilliant green antiseptic and calmly sat down to clean mushrooms.
Every Russian-speaking man is inexplicably confident in his own immortality.
In case of Armageddon, Vitya will scratch his belly, say, “We’ll figure this out,” and he really will. He’ll walk through the dark, crunching spiders underfoot, and screw in a light bulb of hope. And before execution, he won’t sob, wringing his hands, but will just make a grim joke. Women love those kinds of men.
Now about me. I have been living in nature for 54 days, 20 hours, and 18 minutes. Fresh air—anyone who needs it can get it straight from me. Lara forbade me from dying of frostbite like our tomatoes did. Also, I’m not allowed to turn blue in spots.
There’s lots of carbon monoxide here and aggressive insects. Sometimes I want to cry, wringing my hands, but no matter where I turn, Lara is always standing and watching. In her presence, I immediately scratch my belly and make grim jokes.
Lara denies the existence of carbon monoxide. She doesn’t get bitten by insects, even on her muzzle. She takes an ice-cold shower as if it were warm. Our potatoes universally replace tomatoes, meat, and wine. On paper, Lara is a girl, a delicate creature. But inside, she’s a Hun who grew up on the steppe, feeding on raw marmots.
I fell in love with her for her beauty and zest for life. I didn’t know I was marrying a private case of the wild. And now I have to pretend to be healthy, brave, and hate comfort.
One day we drove the car to the store. We just got up to speed when a spider descended from the rearview mirror. Not big, by Devonian standards. Legs, chelicerae, smile, tired wrinkles around the eyes. Hanging, swaying.
On paper, I’m the man here, so I’m the one who’s supposed to die.
I say:
Lara, get ready, I’m going to tear off the web, and you open the window so we can throw the spider out.
In our Citroën, the window control buttons are right in front of our eyes, and Lara had pressed them a hundred times before.
Lara says, “Okay, I’m ready.”
I tear the web off the mirror. From this moment, the spider is under my control, and I am under its.
Open the window! — I shout.
Which button do I press? — she shouts back.
The spider starts climbing up, ready to bite my hand off.
Usually, Lara presses everything randomly — radio, coffee grinder, printer, washing machine, toaster — she’s never once been afraid to accidentally eject herself or launch a Topol missile. She just mashes the buttons. But now suddenly she’s thinking about meanings.
In my left hand, the steering wheel. In my right hand, the thread by which death climbs. I urgently describe the pictogram on the button — a truncated rectangle with a white square inside and a black triangle pointing southeast — that’s exactly how the French represent a window.
The spider starts running. Lara asks, “What’s a truncated rectangle?” I switch to squealing. Lara grabs Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard and hits me, hoping the spider will get some too.
In war, this is called friendly fire. That’s how unpleasant allies get destroyed under the pretense of misunderstanding.
From the roadside cows’ point of view, we stopped for no reason, ran around the car, and then drove off. Many families look like cheerful pranksters from the outside, but in reality, they are tormented by delirium tremens. The least harmed that day was Zbigniew Brzezinski.
More about Vitya, the mushroom picker. To please his wife, he reads two smart books a day. His wife is an intellectual property lawyer. Vitya also cooks dishes with cardamom, saffron, and basil. Yesterday he called and said:
I’ve lived long and realized that you should only ask someone to scratch your back in the most extreme cases.
And here I deeply agree with him.
